Garrick had selected as the site of our operations a corner of the grove where a very large tree raised itself as a landmark, silhouetted in black against a dark sky. We deposited the stuff there as he directed.
"Now, Jim," ordered Dillon, walking back to the car with his man, "I want you to take the car and go back along this road until you reach the top of the hill."
I could not hear the rest of the order, but it seemed that he was to meet someone who had preceded us on foot from the railway station and who must be about due to arrive. I did not know who or what it might be, but even the thought of someone else made me feel safer, for in so ticklish a piece of business as this, in dealing with at least a pair of desperate men such as we knew them to be in the ominously quiet little house, a second and even a third line of re-enforcements was not, I felt, amiss.
Garrick in the meantime had set to work putting into position the huge reflector. At first I thought it might be some method of throwing a powerful light on the house. But on closer examination I saw that it could not be a light. The reflector seemed to have been constructed so that in the focus was a peculiar coil of something, and to the ends of this coil, Garrick attached two wires which he fastened to an instrument, cylindrical, with a broadened end, like a telephone receiver.
Dillon, who had returned by this time, after sending his chauffeur back on his errand, appeared very much interested in what Garrick was doing.
"Now, Tom," said Garrick, "while I am fixing this thing, I wish you would help me by undoing that large package carefully."
While I was thus engaged, he continued talking with Dillon in a low voice, evidently explaining to him the use to which he wished the large reflector put.
I was working quickly to undo the large package, and as the wrappings finally came off, I could see that it was some bulky instrument that looked like a huge gun, or almost a mortar. It had a sort of barrel that might have been, say, forty inches in length, and where the breechlock should have been on an ordinary gun was a great hemispherical cavity. There was also a peculiar arrangement of springs and wheels in the b.u.t.t.
"The coats?" he asked, as he took from the wrappings of the package several rather fragile looking tubes.
I had laid them down near us and handed them over to him. They were quite heavy, and had a rough feel.
"So-called bullet-proof cloth," explained Garrick. "At close range, quite powerful lunges of a dagger or knife recoil from it, and at a distance ordinary bullets rebound from it, flattened. We"ll try it, anyway. It will do no harm, and it may do good. Now we are ready, Dillon."
"Wait just a minute," cautioned Dillon. "Let me see first whether that chauffeur has returned. He can run that engine so quietly that I myself can"t hear it."
He had disappeared into the darkness toward the road, where he had despatched the car a few minutes before. Evidently the chauffeur had been successful in his mission, for Dillon was back directly with a hasty, "Yes, all right. He"s backing the car around so that he can run it out on the road instantly in either direction. He"ll be here in a moment."
Garrick had in the meantime been roughly sketching on the back of an old envelope taken from his pocket. Evidently he had been estimating the distance of the house from the tree back of which he stood, and worked with the light of a shaded pocket flashlight.
"Ready, then," he cried, jumping up and advancing to the peculiar instrument which I had unwrapped. He was in his element now. After all the weary hours of watching and preparation, here was action at last, and Garrick went to it like a starved man at food.
First he elevated the clumsy looking instrument pointed in the general direction of the house. He had fixed the angle at approximately that which he had hastily figured out on the envelope. Then he took a cylinder about twelve inches long, and almost half as much in diameter, a huge thing, constructed, it seemed, of a substance that was almost as brittle as an eggsh.e.l.l. Into the large hemispherical cavity in the breech of the gun he shoved it. He took another quick look at the light gleaming from the house in the darkness ahead of us.
"What is it?" I asked, indicating the "gun."
"This is what is known as the Mathiot gun," he explained as he brought it into action, "invented by a French scientist for the purpose, expressly, of giving the police a weapon to use against the automobile bandits who entrench themselves, when cornered, in houses and garages, as they have done in the outskirts of Paris, and as some anarchists did once in a house in London."
"What does it do?" asked Dillon, who had taken a great interest in the thing.
"It throws a bomb which emits suffocating gases without risking the lives of the police," answered Garrick. "In spite of the fragility of the bombs that I have here, it has been found that they will penetrate a wooden door or even a thin brick part.i.tion before the fuse explodes them. One bomb will render a room three hundred feet off uninhabitable in thirty seconds. Now--watch!"
He had exploded the gun by hand, striking the flat head of a hammer against the fulminating cap. The gun gave a bark. A low, whistling noise and a crash followed.
"Too short," muttered Garrick, elevating the angle of the gun a trifle.
Quite evidently someone was moving in the house. There was a shadow, as of someone pa.s.sing between the light in the upper story and the window on our side of the house.
Again the gun barked, and another bomb went hurtling through the air.
This time it hit the house squarely. Another followed in rapid succession, and the crash of gla.s.s told that it had struck a window.
Garrick was sending them now as fast as he could. They had taken effect, too, for the light was out, whether extinguished by gases or by the hand of someone who realized that it afforded an excellent mark to shoot at. Still, it made no difference, now, for we had the range.
"The house must be full of the stifling gases," panted Garrick, as he stopped to wipe the perspiration from his face, after his rapid work, clad in the heavy coat. "No man could stand up against that. I wonder how our friend of the garage likes it, Tom? It is some of his own medicine--the Chief, I mean. He tried it on us on a small scale very successfully that night with his stupefying gun."
"I hope one of them hit him," ground out Dillon, who had no relish even for the recollection of that night. "What next? Do you have to wait until the gases clear away before we can make a break and go in there?"
Garrick had antic.i.p.ated the question. Already he was b.u.t.toning up his long coat. We did the same, mechanically.
"No, Dillon. You and Jim stay here," ordered Garrick. "You will get the signal from us what to do next. Tom, come on."
He had already dashed ahead into the darkness, and I followed blindly, stumbling over a ploughed field, then a fence over which we climbed quickly, and found ourselves in the enclosure where was the house. I had no idea what we were running up against, but a dog which had been chained in the rear broke away from his fastening at sight of us, and ran at us with a l.u.s.ty and savage growl. Garrick planted a shot squarely in his head.
Without wasting time on any formalities, such as ringing the bell, we kicked and battered in the back door. We paused a moment, not from fear but because the odor inside was terrific. No one could have stayed in that house and retained his senses. One by one, Garrick flung open the windows, and we were forced to stick our heads out every few minutes in order to keep our own breath.
From one room to another we proceeded, without finding anyone. Then we mounted to the second floor. The odour was worse there, but still we found no one.
The light on the third floor had been extinguished, as I have said. We made our way toward the corner where it had been. Room after room we entered, but still found no one. At last we came to a door that was locked. Together we wrenched it open.
There was surely nothing for us to fear in this room, for a bomb had penetrated it, and had filled it completely. As we rushed in, Garrick saw a figure sprawled on the floor, near the bed, in the corner.
"Quick, Tom!" he shouted, "Open that other window. I"ll attend to this man. He"s groggy, anyhow."
Garrick had dropped down on his knees and had deftly slipped a pair of handcuffs on the unresisting wrists of the man. Then he staggered to my side at the open window, for air.
"Heavens--this is awful!" he gasped and sputtered. "I wonder where they all went?"
"Who is this fellow?" I asked.
"I don"t know yet. I couldn"t see."
A moment later, together, we had dragged the unconscious man to the window with us, while I fanned him with my hat and Garrick was wetting his face with water from a pitcher of ice on the table.
"Good Lord!" Garrick exclaimed suddenly, as in the fitful light he bent over the figure. "Do you see who it is?"
I bent down too and peered more closely.
It was Angus Forbes.
Strange to say, here was the young gambler whom we had seen at the gambling joint before it was raided, the long-lost and long-sought Forbes who had disappeared after the raid, and from whom no one had yet heard a word.
I did not know his story, but I knew enough to be sure that he had been in love with Violet himself, and, although Warrington had once come to his rescue and settled thousands of dollars of his gambling debts, was sore at Warrington for closing the gambling joint where he hoped ultimately to recoup his losses. More than that, he was probably equally sore at Warrington for winning the favour of the girl whose fortune might have settled his own debts, if he had had a free field to court her.
Why was Forbes here, I asked myself. The fumes of the bombs from the Mathiot gun may have got into my head but, at least as far as I could see, they had not made my mind any the less active. I felt that his presence here, apparently as one of the gang, explained many things.
Who, I reasoned, would have been more eager to "get" Warrington at any cost than he? I never had any love for the fellow, who had allowed his faults and his temptations so far to get the upper hand of him. I had felt a sort of pity at first, but the incident of the cancelled markers in the gambling joint and now the discovery of him here had changed that original feeling into one that was purely of disgust.
These thoughts were coursing through my fevered brain while Garrick was working hard to bring him around.
Suddenly a mocking voice came from the hall.
"Yes, it"s Forbes, all right, and much good may it do you to have him!"